I am the author of 16 books on artificial intelligence and the semantic web. I use this blog to share ideas and code snippets using my favorite languages: Clojure, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, and Ruby.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Java EE 6 is actually pretty good

I do most of my development in very agile programming environments like Ruby and Rails (with Datamapper or ActiveRecord), Clojure with MongoDB, etc. I like languages that have an interactive repl.

Recently, I have taken on for a new customer helping (a life-long friend's company) do some conversion to Java EE6 and I must say that Java EE 6 is very well done. I wrote a J2EE book many years ago and used to be into Java server side development but drifted to other platforms partly because that is what customers hired me to work on and partly because of my own technical interests. In the last 5 years I have probably spent about 30% of my time working with Java (customers want Lisp and Ruby development).

Java EE 6 is so much better than J2EE. Writing POJOs (with EJB annotations), unit testing them as simple POJOs, and then integration testing them in an EJB container makes for a reasonable programming environment. I still think that you get much more bang for your programming buck with Ruby and Rails but there are applications that fit very well into the Java EE 6 infrastructure.